Tunisiana, the leader in Tunisian mobile telephony with well over 6 million subscribers, recently initiated a project to expand its portfolio to include fast-speed 3G services. As part of this expansion, Tunisiana's engineering team deployed a 10 Gigabit IP backhaul aggregation infrastructure. While this network transformation project is bringing huge cost-saving benefits in the delivery and performance of 3G services, it has generated an equal number of technical and management challenges.

Tunisiana came to us seeking a solution to ease the planning and on-going management of their new transport network infrastructure. The operator was especially concerned about building a network that would be able to handle high quality of service (QoS) expectations in order to support the strong growth of their mobile market.

I am pleased to announce that our flagship network performance management solution, VistaInsight for Networks, is being used today to monitor the availability, current and forecasted traffic loads and saturation of Tunisiana's newest 10-Gigabit IP backhaul network. As a result, Tunisiana is able to more accurately size their infrastructure and investments as well as troubleshoot complex IP/MPLS-driven connections running on its network, meaning that it can better prioritize CAPEX, reduce OPEX and plan the new network far more accurately than ever before.

VistaInsight for Networks enables communication service providers (CSPs) to effectively meet and exceed performance expectations and service-level guarantees of next-generation networks, applications and services. The monitoring platform is able to forecast network capacity requirements based on historical traffic trends, so Tunisiana can accurately plan its networks without over- or under-provisioning capacity. Plus, the actionable service performance visibility of the solution provides a new level of control over the planning, deployment and operational phases of Tunisiana's next generation transport networks.

On top of capacity planning capabilities, VistaInsight for Networks delivers advanced performance metrics and a forecast-driven alerting engine, enabling Tunisiana to more effectively detect, validate and troubleshoot potential service disrupting patterns before services and end users are affected. From the IP/MPLS core through the IP backhaul and packet microwave access networks, Tunisiana is now able to guarantee the integrity of its IP infrastructure and, more importantly, better prioritize capital expenditures and reduce operational expenses through a centralized, end-to-end performance assurance practice.